Latest Insights

Better Fundraising Measurement

Have you ever wondered if you’re measuring things the right way? Could this be done better? Should we find a way to measure this better? In baseball, the players were typically chosen based on speed, quickness, arm strength, hitting ability and mental toughness. Around 1995, the Oakland Athletics team started using a technique called Sabermetrics that focussed on several different statistics like on-base and slugging percentages. This new approach allowed the team to find undervalued players who could deliver great outcomes to attract to their team. This re-thinking of measuring player value allowed them to punch above their weight (in terms of budget) with a more affordable team and remain competitive with teams with significantly higher budgets.

Better Fundraising Measurement

Cost of Living Impacts

There has been an incredible amount of noise in the media over the last 12-18 months about the rising cost of living. Within the fundraising sector, we’ve had opinions formulated, articles published and webinars presented about what donors think they’ll do and what we think they’ll do. But, there needs to be more evidence presented at a macro level about the impacts on realised giving and what we might continue to expect over the next 6-12 months.

High Value Acquisition Results

As part of the Mid-value analysis conducted by the Fundraising Insights program, we observed that about half of mid-value donors were sourced as brand-new recruits. Not upgrades from standard-value, but rather, never seen before brand new donors to our members. It prompted us to think about what triggers them to give and how we can identify more donors like them. We recommended including a high-value ask along with your regular asks in acquisition.

High Value Acquisition

We all know that Return On Investment (ROI) for Direct Mail acquisition makes it harder to put forward a business case that will be acceptable to a reluctant board or cautious executive team. Our earlier insights show that more than half of our first-time high-value donors are also new to our organisations. We haven’t yet explored the source of these recruits in detail but will be investigating in our FY23 program.

High Value Donors

It’s often been said by consultants and those selling cash acquisition products that you must do Cash acquisition as it’s where you find your Mid Value and Major Donors. We’ve recently presented our first Fundraising Insights report, and the findings challenge traditional consultant thinking.

Understanding Value Distribution

How much of your income comes from high-value donors versus mid-value and standard-value? This question is important because

Scale Matters

One of the critical goals of Fundraising Insights is to provide charities with insights that help them form strategic plans for success. Not just for the larger charities that can afford the detailed analysis but also for the smaller charities who typically don’t get access to such insight.

Better Retention

We all strive for better retention, unfortunately it can be one of the more complex measures in fundraising. Conceptually, it seems easy. If a donor gave in one year, did they donate the next year? This approach (we call it snapshot retention¹) has been used widely across the sector, and it’s the calculation we’ve used for a while too. Unfortunately, we believe this approach is flawed for several reasons, and it’s time we start looking for a more accurate measure.

Simulating Retention

As part of our consideration of metrics, we needed to do a deep dive into how retention is calculated in the sector and better understand if current approaches have any unintended side effects. Below is the outcome of our investigations.

Donor Activation

As fundraisers, we know many of the fundamental metrics that should be used to assess the performance of our programs. Things like